Longtime Adams collaborator Peter Sellars created the libretto for Doctor Atomic, drawing from original sources.
Nonesuch released the first recording of John Adams's 2005 opera, Doctor Atomic, on June 29, 2018. Bravo.Grammy Award Nominee: Best Opera Recording Adams gets from the BBC Symphony Orchestra and BBC Singers an intense, overwrought, kaleidoscopic performance that is just what the music ordered, and Nonesuch patches together the several performances here expertly. You might think that British singers would be an impediment in text that often talks about American national aspirations, but it's not so: what has been called the transatlantic theatrical accent is close to the one singers of both nationalities tend to use, and after a brief suspension of disbelief you won't even think about it. Gerald Finley is a gripping Oppenheimer, and all the singers put the text across immediately. It is drawn mostly on a live concert performance in London that clearly made a strong connection with the audience. The work has been recorded, but this version conducted by Adams may be regarded as definitive. Female characters - scientist Robert Oppenheimer's wife, Kitty, and Pasqualita, a Tewa maid - are introduced, and they only increase the variety.
Adams responded with a score that encompasses all these and never interrupts the sense of gathering doom the listener feels. The music includes settings of poetry by Baudelaire, Donne, and Muriel Rukeyser, as well as the Hindu Bhagavad Gita and a traditional Tewa Native American song. The libretto by Peter Sellars, largely based on declassified documents, has been criticized as too choppy, but to these ears its shifts are what makes the work: it called forth an extraordinarily varied score from Adams. Audiences have their own favorites among the operas of John Adams, but Doctor Atomic (2005) has the advantage of being inarguably suited in its subject matter to the dimensions of grand opera: it takes for its topic the detonation of the first atomic bomb, with its first act occurring a month before the event and the second just before the successful test in New Mexico.
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